It may be necessary for a sports fan to be away from a live television or radio broadcast of a sporting event while attending another important occasion, such as a business meeting. Nevertheless, the sports fan desires to know the changes in the status of the sporting event or game as they occur. This desire may be fulfilled with a portable information receiver which receives and alerts the user of game changes as they occur. Use of such a receiver allows the sports fan to concentrate on other important events while remaining informed of changes in the game. One portable information receiver capable of functioning as described is the Motorola SportsTrax.TM. sporting event receiver. This sporting event receiver receives information about status changes in baseball games, the status changes being transmitted by a paging system using a typical paging protocol, such as the POCSAG (Post Office Code Standardization Advisory Group) format.
A baseball game has many status changes, some of which are important to the outcome of the game and some of which are substantially less important. Since the sports fan using a sporting event receiver may be attending another important occasion, the sports fan may desire the sporting event receiver to interrupt the important occasion with an alert only in response to an important status change in the baseball game. However, the type of status change in the game itself is often an insufficient criterion for determining which status changes in the game are important. For example the type of status change in a baseball game could be the scoring of a run by a home team. A run scored by a home team which breaks a tied score is substantially more important than a run scored by the home team when the home team already has a substantial lead. The sports fan may prefer to be interrupted with an alert in response to the scoring of the tie breaking run, and not to be interrupted when the home team increases an already substantial lead. Thus, what is needed is a sporting event receiver capable of determining when a status change is important enough to generate an alert interrupting an import occasion attended by the sports fan.
Furthermore, the importance of the occasion attended by the sports fan may vary depending upon the circumstances and type of occasion. In response, the sports fan may want to vary the level of importance of a status change which will cause the sporting event receiver to cause an interruption. For example the sports fan may be attending a very important occasion such as a wedding and may desire to only be alerted of only very important status changes, such as the making or breaking of a tie score. On the other hand, the sports fan may be attending a less important occasion such as a training lecture, and thus would prefer to be alerted of many, if not all, of the changes in the game status. For example, the sports fan could prefer to be alerted of all score changes. In addition, if the score is close, then the sports fan might prefer being alerted of the number of outs in an inning. However, the sports fan might not prefer to be alerted of less important changes such as changes in base runners or the number of outs when the score is not dose. Thus, what is needed is a sporting event receiver capable of determining when a status change is important enough to generate an alert which interrupts an occasion of varying importance.
Furthermore, paging channels are already crowded with information being sent to many paging receivers. Information services, such as sporting event services, share the paging system with other users and may be billed by the amount of information transmitted. In order to maximize profits, it is desirable to reduce the cost of information transmitted by reducing the transmission of unimportant information. For example status changes such a bails and strikes occur rapidly and seldom have an important impact upon the game. Their occurrence may only be important enough to merit the expense of their transmission under certain circumstances such as a tie score or in the final inning of the game. Thus, what is needed is a way to minimize the amount of status changes transmitted in the signal without substantially reducing the importance of information received by the sports fan.
Also, as the paging channel crowding varies over time, the latency and grouping of paging messages changes. On a crowed paging system, the message latency, or delay from the origination of a message to its transmission, may be considerable. A considerable delay includes delays ranging from one to five minutes. For rapidly changing game information status, a substantial latency in the paging system may render information of little importance. The information may actually become a meaningless nuisance to the sports fan because the information is outdated by the time it is received. Similarly, the queuing of messages by the paging system may group messages of certain types together for bulk transmission. For rapidly changing, low importance information, this may make the reception of the information a nuisance for the sports fan. For example, the grouping of three status changes including of one "strike" and two "balls" for grouped bulk transmission by a paging system would result in the almost simultaneous reception of all three status updates. The grouped timing of the reception of low importance, multiple status changes could be perceived as a nuisance by the sports fan. Furthermore, these messages burden an already crowded paging system. Thus, what is needed is a method of reducing the number of unnecessary messages sent by a paging system.